


Christmas Midrash Aggada

by Tammany



Series: Assorted Advent Stories, Christmas 2014, All-sorts, some connected. [33]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Christmas, Gen, Midrash, Theological Jazz
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 10:22:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2847557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Midrash Aggada is a traditional method of exploring scripture drawn from the Jewish tradition--rabbinic and Talmudic. A light, rather flip definition might be "Sacred fanfic told using scriptural characters and situations to explore theological premises." Storytelling with theological whup-ass potency.</p><p>As I have said before, I've tried to stay away from too much theology and doctrine in this. But on Christmas Day, as the last section before heading toward New Years, it seems fair and reasonable to write this as another aside, and let Sherlock the atheist and Mycroft the theist have a discussion from the heart of their own individual uncertainties.</p><p>It's a Christmas midrash about Christmas midrash, as Mike tries to explain about believing the unbelievable, and having faith in what you can only imagine.</p><p>On any given day I'm both Sherlock and Mycroft in this argument. I quite enjoyed writing Sherlock's furious and defiant disbelief.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Christmas Midrash Aggada

“I don’t believe in you,” Sherlock said, quietly, standing in the little chapel as the sun came up. “I don’t. It makes no logical sense. Let us, for the sake of discussion, set aside the creation of the universe—even I can see loopholes for the theists. Divinity has always included that which is beyond and aside from the known physical universe—and what is the moment, the spark, the big bang of creation but the transition from the beyond to the known? So let it pass. And evolution—if the literalists demand scripture be reckoned one and the same as a lab report, only insisting that scripture is the more factual and accurate, they can hardly be reckoned the only tradition of interpretation. The majority of modern Christians are happily content to give Darwin a pass, and sport both the ichthys and the Darwin-Fish on their bumpers with no sense of conflict.”

“Still, I do not believe in you. I do not believe that the test of Eden was fair or just. I do not believe that the knowledge of good and evil is in itself evil—nor that it could demand death unending and inevitable on all creation from the moment the apple was bitten. I find the entire story barbarous as history, and unjust as theology. I do not believe.”

“I do not believe in a blood-debt passed through the generations, birth after birth and death after death, doled out to an angry God. I do not believe in hell and damnation. I do not believe in the world redeemed by some muddled, confusing blend of incarnation and ritual animal sacrifice on an impromptu altar made from a Roman crucifix.”

“I believe you were born—but not as the only begotten son of God. I believe you lived—but not that you worked miracles. I believe that you died—but not that you harrowed hell or rose on the third day.”

“I don’t believe in you.”

“I don’t believe a true God—as described and assumed—can be a fair and loving God, and still do as you are said to have done, and allowed what you allow daily. I cannot believe you see the fall of the sparrow and still allow that fall—not if you are just, much less loving. What a tender world that might be—one ruled by a God who saw the fall—and prevented it. In a world where babies die daily, in cribs and in their mothers’ arms, in pain and in fear and without understanding, I do not believe God is good. Not if you are what they say, with the power they ascribe to you, and the actions reported. Moriarty was kinder. Magnussen more gentle.”

“I do not believe…”

“Except…”

He closed his eyes a moment, and the frown formed between his brows—the strange horizontal crease over his nose accompanied by bewildered eyes struggling for a solution to the insoluble. At last he said, softly.

“Except your name. ‘Emmanuel.’ God with us. Except the insistence that you are us, and became us, and made us become you. I can believe in God as a single human, incarnating all the life and power and wonder of the universe—and of everything possible beyond. I can believe in a God who isn’t what they say he is—but is us. Every burning moment, every tear, in us and of us and with us. A God who falls with the sparrow. Who dies with the baby. Who is reborn with each new generation and lost with each ugly, lonely, eternal death. I can believe in a God who redeems us by being us, and asking us to be him. Who takes on mortality and helps us become more than mortal.”

He looked up and said. “It’s all bollocks. Not one bit of it can be proved. But I’ve seen them, dead on the cobbles and gutted in the alleys. They do not move me—but the fact that they exist at all—that does. If the blood and the ugliness and the whole stupid, moronic, pointless cruelty is your will—then I refuse to believe in you. But if it’s our will, and you suffer it with us…”

He sighed. “I don’t believe in Emmanuel, either. But I could find it in me to wish that I could.”

Behind him he heard movement. His head came up and he frowned. “Oh, for God’s sake, Mike, go away.”

“According to you, there is no God,” Mycroft said, softly.

“It’s an illogical construct promoted by irrational zealots incapable of coherent thought,” Sherlock snapped. “The entire bunged up mess makes no sense.”

“A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?”

“Oh, do stop. Just because you can quote scripture…”

“Shakespeare, actually, and how you can make such a dog’s dinner of cultural referents I don’t know. It’s not as though either Eton or Cambridge is known for skipping the cultural cornerstones that completely.”

“Fine. Shakespeare. It’s still bogus. I don’t know how you can even sustain belief in your own lunatic fashion.”

“I don’t,” Mycroft said. “I sustain faith. And hope, I suppose. That’s quite a different thing.”

“How so?” Sherlock growled. His eyes never left the rose window at the heart of the cross.

“I have faith that the world should mean, ‘Emmanuel,’ even if it doesn’t—and that if we live as though God is with us, and in us, and of us… then maybe the sparrows and the dead babies are redeemed just by the act of our own sacrifice.”

“Bollocks.”

“Probably.”

“Magical thinking.”

“Oh, assuredly.”

“Pointless, idiotic assigning of meaning and intent where nothing exists but cause, effect, and closure.”

Mycroft sighed. “Oh, I agree.”

“Ridiculous. You can’t see the logical disconnect?”

“I also believe that light is a particle, a wave—and nothing at all but existence made manifest. That’s what science assures me, no matter how fantastic it may seem.”

Sherlock scowled, dark and angry. “Stop playing silly buggers, Mycroft. It’s true or false. One or the other.”

“Only after you open the box,” Mycroft said. “Until you open it, God is neither. Or both.”

Sherlock barked his fury. “I don’t believe in Shroedinger’s God.”

“Nor should you. You’ll alter its position. Or confuse your understanding of its location. Or shift its vector. Or something similarly peculiar.”

“You’re playing verbal games with numeric truths. Make the same jokes with hard figures, and then I may be convinced.”

“You’re not the mathematician,” Mycroft pointed out.

They were silent, then Sherlock finaly turned. “Why?”

Mycroft shrugged. “Because that’s what my entire life is—working to create what should be out of what is. If I couldn’t believe in should be even more passionately than I believe in what is, the game would be over. Sherlock, I have to believe in so many impossible things just to get through my day. What’s a God who’s with us and in us and of us, who lives and dies and rises again with us, compared to believing peace is possible, and lives worth saving?” He smiled then. “That’s my favorite, you know.”

“Favorite what?”

“Carol.” He sang very softly, his voice a warm, wistful hum, his tenor dropped to his lowest register. “Oh, come, oh, come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here, until the son of God appear. Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall ransom captive Israel.” Christmas in a nutshell—what was, was. What is, is—but in the end, what we pray for is what will be. God with us—and a happy ending. Somehow.”

“Sentimental hogwash.”

“Probably.”

“Prat.”

“No doubt.”

Sherlock stalked toward the exit from the little chapel, but paused before he left the room. “He accepted, didn’t he?”

“You knew he would.”

“And you accepted?”

“I’d be a fool not to.”

“Thus my worry,” Sherlock drawled. “I am relieved your rumored intelligence was operating. Merry Christmas, Mike.”

“St. Stephen’s Day.”

“Oh, good. If you murder someone I’ll have a case.”

“Dream on, brother mine.”

Sherlock snorted and left. But once outside with the door swung shut behind him, he stopped and listened as his brother’s clarinet tenor rose up, aching.

_Oh, come, Desire of nations bind_

_In one the hearts of all mankind._

_Oh, bid our sad divisions cease,_

_And be yourself our King of Peace._

_Rejoice, rejoice! Emmanuel_

_Shall come to thee, oh, Israel!_

John Watson, at the edge of death, he thought, had prayed—had prayed, “Oh, God, let me live!” Sherlock was sure there was no God to answer him. And yet---

Even Sherlock wasn’t sure what was really important. That there was no God to hear—or that John Watson prayed anyway. In Mycroft’s crazy, quantum reasoning, perhaps it was the power and truth of John’s prayers that demanded there be a God, not the other way around.

Either way, it was Boxing Day, and Christmas had come and gone.

 

**Nota Bene:**

[Oh, Come, Oh, Come Emmanuel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vatvUREAPY0)  Among our oldest, most weird, most complicated, and most yearning Christmas carols. And another spooky, shivery, creepy version of the hymn [here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiGyRAhpgQo)


End file.
